How does a technology first invented in 1843 and executed in 1924 still exist as a primary function in our working lives? I’m talking about fax. The fax technology is old and outdated. I personally avoid fax simply because of principle. But my principle alone will not make big changes in adoption. What people don’t understand is that we have a fax replacement right under our noses, one that is both green and as easy to use.

The combination of a document scanner, imaging software, and email software is a complete fax replacement solution. Instead of typing in phone numbers users, can type in email addresses. In fax you double the amount of paper that exists. Paper in, paper out. With the document scanning approach, you are reducing the paper consumption, paper in, email out. Most document scanners today even ship with a pre-configured “Scan to Email” option. On a production level, systems can be setup in offices, your local Kinkos, wherever, to allow multiple users to access the same document scanner and scan to any email with a basic step-by-step wizard.

Not only is fax to email saving trees, it is also increasing efficiency and when combined with workflow, document imaging, OCR, and data capture, it adds much greater value for that single piece of paper.

These systems do in fact exist in small corners of the world, and I have participated in the development and setup of them. The adoption is still very low. What it comes down to is fear of change. People understand paper to paper. Many users of fax don’t even know what email is. There are two ways this can be solved, time and forced adoption. While I would hope for the second which would be a campaign of replacing all fax machines with scanners, it’s very unlikely and requires unity of multiple competing entities.

No I do not like fax, but I understand it. And I hope that sooner rather than later people see there has been a solution to replace fax that is both saving trees, increasing efficiency and has existed for many years.